By this time of the year, your students are ready to take the reins. Teaching them how to run their own reading group (in any content area) frees you up to pull small groups, check in with certain students, assess students' skills, and so on.

This link will take you to a great resource for roles, instructions, graphic organizers, role cards, question stems, examples, self-reflective feedback forms, and more. You can literally implement this tomorrow. Have fun and get those students working harder than you!

What are you going to do over winter break? Check out Visit Phoenix for things to do around town.

The previous blog post comes from a teacher run Website that houses tons of resources and learning opportunities. It's called the Daily Cafe and is managed by two sisters who are also top-notch educators. I am signed up for the weekly newsletter which offers great nuggets like the one I just re-posted. The great thing is that The Sister's know our time is precious, so the nuggets are short, sweet, and to the point.

If you would like to share your favorite education resource, comment below.

******************* TIME TO DO SOMETHING FOR YOU ***********************

While we would all love to protect our kids (our own and our students) from tragedy, we simply do not have that power. But what you do as the adult in charge can lessen the emotional impact and offer great support. Your actions are a game changer.

How Teachers And Schools Can Help When Bad Stuff Happens posted last month on NPR Ed supports educators with practical advice. Anya Kamenetz shares that "The National Survey of Children's Health consistently finds that nearly half of American children experience at least one adversity such as physical abuse or food insecurity, and 1 in 5 experience at least two."

She offers these reminders or starting points:

Address community issues sensitively from the beginning.

Remember that fear comes from a lack of control, a safe environment is crucial.

Be aware of acting out behaviors or withdrawal. Keep family/counselor apprised.

CARE for Teachers teaches "mindfulness: calming the body and mind through breathing and movement, and using insights from psychology to better regulate your emotions."

Give choices to acting out rather than punishment.

You do so much everyday to help children, and they are better because of you! A fact you should never question. If you are experiencing trauma yourself, get support. You must take care of yourself before you can take care of others. Find a support group near you ranging from grief to PTSD to adolescent support. We wish you well over the holidays and a great upcoming New Year.

The research is in. Our brains are hardwired to forget. Which may explain why the kitchen trash never seems to go out!

It's frightening to study the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve (below), but we can ALL identify! Fortunately, research also tells us what we can do in our classes to fight these odds. Scroll down for some quick tips.

Image credit: A segment of Sequoia’s Cherokee alphabet (National Endowment of the Humanities)

President George H. W. Bush signed a joint resolution in 1990 marking November as Native American Heritage Month. Learn how it took nearly 80 years for this honor to come about on the National Native American Heritage Month Web Portal. With this site, you can:

Take your students to Sitka National Historical Park via virtual tour

Find resources in a friendly guide

Browse ready-to-use lesson plans

Use audio and video resources

The one-stop-portal contains education and teacher resources from and is supported the following:

Do your students fake it? Strategies for building a risk-taking class.

We've all heard the phrase Fake It Until You Make It, but there is an inherent problem when we tell our students that.

"...most students only risk doing something poorly if they think they will ultimately succeed.

Our students regularly look to us to gauge what is possible and help them develop their most capable selves. How we name and frame what is possible for students often shapes their own sense of possibility."

Creating Classroom Conditions That Grow Student Potential

Embracing Challenges as Opportunities

Click here to learn why faking it only works if there is a potential and support to make it.

FREEBIES!

Love your students but don't always love your job?

Join us for Design Day: a full-day "design lab" experience where you will create systems to bring more joy to your teaching... despite external constraints.

Design Day is built on the Design Thinking framework which brings people together to dig really deep into issues and then design small-scale solutions that are actually doable!

This day is exclusively for teachers. It is on a Saturday (November 4, 2017), so you don't need permission or a substitute. It's free, so you don't need to beg for money. It's guaranteed to be high-energy and super engaging. Oh, and lunch is included!

We only have space for 40 people, so sign up quickly. If you sign up, we really need you to show up, so please make sure the date works for you. Register here.

Exclusive Invite for Third Grade Teachers... Pass It On!

Register to receive "OS Cross" cabbage for your third grade class. The students grow these cabbage known for producing giant heads at home and bring it back to class for judging day. A class winner is selected (based on size, appearance, and maturity) and entered into a $1000.00 state-wide scholarship drawing. What a fun way to teach students about nature and healthy eating. I'm willing to bet there's reading, writing, math, science, and social studies activities that could complement this adventure.

Can you believe that National Earth Science Week is already here? If it slipped off your calendar, I have a great way to get your students involved with a #neatrock activity with the Science Friday Science Club.

It's so easy.

1) Take a picture of a neat rock you have found.

2) Post at #neatrock with any details you have about the rock.

3) A scientist from the American Geologists Institute will help you identify your rock and provide it's background.

Your students will be on pins and needles waiting to hear back from the scientists. It's such a great way to foster curiosity and learn something new.

Listen on Soundcloud to learn more about this opportunity and to help build a really cool online rock collection.

You might have heard, even love, TED Talks, but did you know that TED does more than talks?

TEDed Lessons Worth Sharing is a FREE but totally priceless resource for teachers and students (searchable by content). The lessons are short, sweet, and to the point and even come with a comprehension quiz. You can use these resources to:

Springboard new content

Peak curiosity

Provide examples

Scaffold

Differentiate

the list goes on and on and on...

Each Lesson Comes in 4 parts:

Watch

Think

Dig Deeper

Discuss

If you have a couple more minutes, be blown away by an example video below. You'll love how clear, concise, short, and USABLE it is.

***Please leave us comments about how you like the content of TXTS 4 Teachers, or how you might use this resource in your classroom. We would love to hear from you.***

Seven short years ago, less than 60% of parents carried a smartphone. Today, we are closing in on 95%. 5% are connected all the time with a smartwatch. But, the question remains, how do your students' parents want to hear from you?

Hubspot has conducted research on this topic and will send you a free report that outlines how parents want to be communicated with. Here's a teaser:

Sample from "Table 2: most effective digital communication tools by school type"

Texting

61% in Elementary Schools

57% in Middle Schools

55% in High Schools

School/district Facebook

45% in Elementary Schools

41% in Middle Schools

39% in High Schools

Today's freebies for digital communication

1. Remind - Finally, a way to end unread emails and endless paper flyers.

2. Class Dojo - A community building platform that reaches out to parents.

Our young people are especially susceptible to trauma and often times cover that trauma up. How do you spot a child suffering from childhood trauma? You'd be surprised how difficult it is to pinpoint. Start by making your classroom trauma sensitive. To learn more, click here.

Exit tickets are a quick, easy, and great strategy to check for understanding and plan for next steps. The following are some things to keep in mind when using exit tickets:

Begin with the end in mind. Ensure your questions are precise enough for students to give you the information you need. Write questions that assess understanding, apply the concept, or demonstrate the concept.

Keep it brief. Exit tickets are intended to challenge your students while providing you feedback for planning. They should be able to be completed in under five minutes.

Examine the tickets carefully. Sort tickets into groups based on what you need to know. For example: students that understand the content, students that don’t understand the content, and students that you are unsure about. However you organize the data, make sure that it gives you an overall picture of your classroom.

You are back in front of the classroom and ready to rock the 2017-2018 school year! You most certainly have gone over your classroom procedures. But if things aren't clicking along as you had hoped, it's not too late to set yourself up for the best year ever. Legendary teachers, Linda Kardamis and Viki Davis, chatted about this very thing on the Cool Cat Teacher podcast. Here are some takeaways:

1. Spend more time on procedures than you think you should. You don't teach division, grammar, or the scientific method once and move on. The same goes for procedures. If your students don't master your procedures in the first few weeks of school, it sets the tone for the rest of the year.

2. Task analyze every procedure. We can't take for granted that students know how to successfully complete a procedure. "Pass your papers to the front of the room," can be done many ways. Be specific and teach each step.

3. Don't let the little things go. Note the student actions you find yourself redirecting over and over. Those are areas where a procedure may need to be taught.

4. Be a mentor, not a buddy. It's important that students like you (see Kids Don't Learn from People they Don't Like). However, students can like you without you being their friend. Students like mentors that are "both kind and firm, personable but not a pushover, understanding, kind, compassionate, and who deal with issues."

5. Prep for procedure violations. A lot of emphasis is put on prepping for lessons. But we must also be prepared for when kids break a procedure. Think about it ahead of time. "What will I do when a student runs through the classroom when the bell rings?" Being prepared keeps us from under or over reacting.

Teachers constantly nurture the relationship between motivation and engagement. Knowing how to design learning experiences using strategies that build learner self-direction and ownership of learning sets great teachers and great lessons apart. There are many tools that can support the facilitation of authentic engagement where students are not just compliant, but can see a connection between the assigned task and the results. The following three are just a few of them:

Padlet empowers collaboration across distances without much set up. Think of Padlet as an electronic Post-it note wall. The difference is, the Post-it notes can be text, images, and videos. Check out an example of how two teachers in two different classrooms use Padlet to facilitate student-to-student interactions.

Socrative enables students to use any internet-connected device with a web browser to become a student response system. Socrative empowers the teacher to receive real-time data about what students are thinking and understanding. See a classroom example here.